Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House, an isolated manse in the English countryside, early in the very wet spring of 1950, to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, who is dying of cancer. Hart House is also inhabited by Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart’s war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. When a child’s game goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow—love, perhaps—descends upon its inhabitants. Like the misguided child’s play, other seemingly random events—a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter—propel Coral and Clement into the dark thicket of marriage.
A period novel observed through a refreshingly gimlet eye, Coral Glynn explores how quickly need and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical. Borrowing from themes and characters prevalent in the work of mid-twentieth-century British women writers, Peter Cameron examines how we live and how we love—with his customary empathy and wit.
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Review
Praise for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You:
"Deliciously vital right from the start . . . A piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book . . . It is a bravura performance, and . . . a stunning little book." —Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books
Praise for Coral Glynn:
“A sad, beautiful, absorbing story of love missed, love lost, love found … Cameron has taken great pains to artfully reveal the wounding shards of personal history that motivate—or enervate—every character. They lie inside each person, so the reader has the sense of their hidden presence even before the lacerating shock when they’re let loose. Quite apart from the narrative drive, there is plenty of propulsion in the powerful elegance of the writing of this story of a young nurse named Coral Glynn.” —Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review
“Peter Cameron spent part of his childhood in England, so his accent, so to speak, is authentic; but it’s also derived from his veneration for British miniaturists like the novelists Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym. . . Pull up a chair by the fire and settle in, but don't get too lulled by the domestic setting, because Cameron's writing is full of sharp angles and unanticipated swerves into the droll and the downright weird . . . Coral Glynn is young, alone in the world, and described by other characters as ‘rather pretty . . . in a plain way.’ If that phrase puts you in mind of Jane Eyre, it should; Cameron also doffs his cap to Daphne DuMaurier’s classic about a solitary orphan, Rebecca. I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that Coral Glynn is not ‘about’ anything so much as it is about the pleasures of storytelling. Even throwaway scenes are so closely observed, they offer the delight of the unexpected word or detail. [Cameron] artfully compresses so many beloved English stories and tropes into one smashing novel.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Some novels hit you twice: while you’re caught in their spell, and then again, after you’ve finished and are left wondering, What was that all about? At first blush, Peter Cameron's Coral Glynn is a curio—an atmospheric period piece. In its simplicity, it seems a throwback to mid-20th-century domestic novels, but with echoes of Jane Eyre—a sort of Gothic lite. However, its concerns with repressed homosexuality, lies of omission and whether it's preferable to settle for ‘a quiet, decent life’ or hold out for greater fulfillment are timeless . . . Cameron revisits the themes of alienation and duplicity explored in his contemporary novels set in America, which include Andorra, The Weekend and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. His writing is as quiet and unassuming as his heroine, with occasional flashes of surprising beauty. Holly leaves shiver ‘metallically . . . the sound of the world asking once again to be assuaged.’ The various strands of Coral Glynn come together as neatly as a schoolgirl’s early morning braid. But some loose ends inevitably work their way free—and that’s where, in the end, Cameron obliquely directs our focus . . . What do our reactions to this story—and specifically, our propensity to seek a happily-ever-after, all’s-well-that-ends-well ending—indicate about us? Cameron writes, ‘How was it ever possible to know who, or what, people really were? They were all like coins, with two sides, or die, with six.’ In retrospect, Cameron’s mesmerizing, melancholy novel is not as pat as it seems. And that’s where it really gets interesting.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Peter Cameron [is] an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer . . . The plots, the ventures, the encounters of his characters, instead of taking them from point A to point B, abduct them into unintended and more expansive itineraries.” —Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
“A big, dark house in the English countryside, with its brooding, damaged master; the pretty but gawky young woman who comes to work there—and to stumble over secrets in gloomy hallways: These are the elements of an old-fashioned gothic tale, and also of Peter Cameron’s lovely, enigmatic new novel, Coral Glynn . . . There’s a way stories like this are supposed to go, and Coral Glynn both does and doesn’t play by the old rules . . . Coral Glynn is a tribute to a certain breed of novel most often written by British women in the mid-20th century: astringently unsentimental, disciplined, replete with half-acknowledged emotions moving like the shadows of alarmingly large fish deep beneath the surface of the sea. Because their own time preferred to valorize a more chest-thumping sort of writer, their brilliance has been almost forgotten. Some, like Muriel Spark, never entirely slipped from view. Others, like Elizabeth Taylor, are just now being revived. There’s a dash of Daphne du Maurier here, too, and a touch of the sublime Barbara Pym . . . Like Cameron’s novels, these books have won a following that makes up in tenacity for what it lacks in size. The audience for both keeps on growing, one devoted reader at a time.” —Laura Miller, Salon
“In his moody and haunting Coral Glynn, Peter Cameron serves up all the elements of gothic fiction . . . The novelist adds enough twists and tensions to make the book feel refreshingly new . . . With its echoes of Iris Murdoch’s moral fables and Daphne du Maurier’s lush romances, Coral Glynn is like an engrossing black-and-white movie for a rainy afternoon—a tale of clouded hearts, hidden motives and dangerous affections.” —Mark Doty, More Magazine
“Like its packaging, Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn is spare and unassuming. Mr. Cameron announces his talent in the way that matters: by telling a riveting tale with an often heartbreakingly pure prose style . . . Though American, Mr. Cameron is presenting an updated version of the classic English novel of manners, with its themes of balked love and painfully polite misunderstandings. Every timorous gesture points to some profound psychological fear . . . Scenes unfold with the exquisite design of a one-act play, with props skillfully deployed to comic and poignant effect . . . [Cameron’s] writing . . . is bracingly unvarnished and unsentimental, stripped of pity or condescension. It is as though he has set an X-ray machine before the traditional English drawing room, leaving its demure occupants exposed in their loneliness and well-meant follies—and revealing them as movingly human.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“[Cameron’s] chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction . . . Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale . . . [He] specializes in emotional subtlety and unspoken desires—all the while hinting at an almost overwhelming disorder swirling beneath the placid surface . . . We may be so slow to recognize Cameron as a twenty-first-century American master because he has the sensibility of a twentieth-century British one.” —Christopher Beha, Bookforum
“Cameron writes great novels the way they are intended to be, as art of pure imagination. Never repeating himself, ever expanding into new territory, Cameron for the first time here sets his story in England and in the past . . . Strange relationships, double personalities, and the word ‘odd’ echo throughout this disquieting novel that captures what it must have been like to live in a nation muddling through profound shock in the war's long aftermath. Really, the book is about depression, yet it perpetually glows with wry or laugh aloud moments . . . With its vaguely dreamlike aura and its accusation of murder, the book's mood is closest to that of Cameron’s third novel, Andorra. But Coral Glynn is even better. It takes bigger leaps, goes deeper, and to my mind is more nervewrecking because the well-meaning characters make such terrible choices. The only choice for you to make is when to read it because as one of the year's best books it cannot be missed.” —Stephen Bottum, Band of Thebes
“Beauty and loss suffuse Peter Cameron's atmospheric period novel, set in the English countryside in the 1950s. When she is hired to care for a dying woman at the woman's isolated home, a young nurse discovers that the secluded mansion is also inhabited by the dying woman's wounded-veteran son. Exploring themes of love and longing, Cameron's skillfully wrought tale lures readers into a somber, dreamlike world.” —Barnes & Noble (Best of the Month pick)
“With its atmospheric Fifties setting and stylish writing, this is one of Cameron’s . . . finest novels.” —Library Journal
“Cameron’s shimmering and expectant prose infuses this deceptively simple novel with an incandescent depth . . . The decidedly somber and gothic tone of the narrative rings the perfect warning note as the reader begins to suspect that a standard fairy-tale ending is highly unlikely for a cast of lost souls forlornly muted by unrequited longings.” —Booklist
“Set in the English countryside in the aftermath of WWII, this quietly compelling sixth novel from Cameron . . . focuses on the story of the eponymous heroine, Coral, a nurse, sent to Hart House in 1950 to tend the dying Mrs. Hart ...
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Customer Reviews
Coral Glynn is a young nurse, and she has been hired to provide private nursing care to old Mrs Hart who is dying of some malady. She arrives at this big dark house in the country and is shown to her room. An attic room with a singular unmade bed. Her patient requires care and injections for her pain, and that keeps Coral busy. Mrs Hart's son, Clement Hart, is the only other member of the family. He was injured in the great War, and has a limp from bad burns. He has cloistered himself in the house, and goes out a couple of times a week to meet a friend, Robin in the local pub. There is some implication of repressed homosexuality and that complicates the storyline. The housekeeper/cook is Mrs Prence, an unlikable, bitter old woman. Not much of a life. Coral's only relief from nursing Mrs Hart is walking in the local forest, and on one of her walks she encounters two young children playing frightening, odd games. She tries to intervene, but they seem intent upon continuing. For some unfathomable reason she lets this incident go. Her patient dies and Major Hart asks her to marry. This sets off a strange set of incidents that seem quite unlikely, but in those times, and in that place, it must be true. Lives are set apart, the police come to call, and Coral leaves quietly in the night. Misunderstandings and unsaid words are some of the causes, but it is the people, who think so lowly of themselves, who do not have the courage to speak up, to set things right. This is a world that is foreign to me, but in this day where women's rights are being trampled upon, I can begin to understand this kind of non-action.
This is a book so well written that I savored every word. It creeps up on you, the feelings and actions of these people so foreign to our lives of today. Unrequited love and sad, lonely lives are woven throughout the book, so each character seems to fit in succinctly.
"Major Hart tells a male friend that he's thinking of proposing marriage, the friend asks the major exactly what he feels,
"I would not call it a happiness," says Maj. Hart. "A relief, perhaps. A feeling of something alive between us. A connection, I suppose." This is the kind of life that is expected in these circumstances, happiness is not understood nor expected. I heard Maureen Corrigan on NPR give a review of this book, which caused me to purchase it and read it. What she said stayed with me. "To extend the Jane Eyre comparison for a second, the impediment to marriage here is not a mad wife in the attic, but a sad friend in the closet."
Highly Recommended. prisrob 03-14-12
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel
The Weekend: A Novel
But Coral's amoral awfulness doesn't mar this novel! Far from it! It's what makes the plot possible. The book is full of unlikable characters but that makes it deliciously fun. What's really great is that the plot is quite a departure from the standard "gothic romance" so that you won't anticipate what's going to happen next to these people. (Wait until you see how it turns out! I WAS SURPRISED!)
Cameron does an exquisite job of showing the reader what's really going on among the Major, Coral, and his best friend Robin and Robin's chatty wife, Dolly. The novel is set in the early 1950s when most of the "sub textual" activities in this novel aren't even acknowledge to exist.
It was precisely the "different-ness" of this novel that made me enjoy it and recommend it here to readers who like being a bit surprised in the end.
No one has mentioned the appalling editing job in this book. I don't mind an error or two in a book, but this was riddled with them. It's as if the editor ran a spell check and didn't read the book. There are missing words, substitutions for words, such as "this" for "his", repeated words, missing end quotes. By the last 20 pages, there are mistakes on just about every page. I expected more professionalism from such a distinguished publisher.
I couldn't help feeling a bit letdown at the end because I thought with a little more effort, this book could have been really something to recommend. I certainly felt that way until about half way through.
Felicitously written and able to evoke emotion for its characters, Coral Glynn is a strong book, ultimately undone by its cipher-like eponymous lead... Read more
